According to Pew Research, 22 percent
of all adults have sold things online, but most of them just post a
notice in plain text, no pictures. We came across a great way to
correct that, with professional looking sales flyers generated for
free by vFlyer.com.

As a test
we submitted information and pricing on a minivan we own but had no
intention of selling. A flyer was created in a few seconds and it
looked as good as a car company ad in a glossy magazine. We could
have posted this to several online marketplaces with a single click
at the vFlyer Web site. But if we
wanted to post it to the two major online markets, eBay and Craig's
List, we had to copy the HTML code and paste it into those sites.
Actually, this turned out to be a simple cut and paste operation,
with vFlyer showing us what to do.

The
flyers can also be e-mailed or printed. If you think people on a
particular e-mail list would be interested in what you have to sell
or trade, the flyer can be automatically inserted into each message.
vFlyer also provides a report on how many "views" your flyer got.
Later they're going to offer resume flyers for job seekers.

The creation process was interesting,
because we had to go through a check list for any of the most
commonly posted products, and that list covered a lot of things
people often forget. For example, if we wanted to sell a computer,
the checklist asked if it had a floppy drive, if it wrote to DVDs as
well as CDs, and so on. No matter what you're selling, you can have
up to 25 pictures in the flyer, very useful for real estate or
collections of items.

A natural question is, how do they, the vFlyer people, make money
off a free service? The answer is ancillary ads. In other words,
they add a paid advertisement to your flyer, and the subject of that
ad will be related to yours, but not competitive with it. For
example, if you're selling a car, they might add a clickable box for
insurance or accessories.

All in all,
this is a remarkable service and we were impressed.

Getting
Snippy

Just when we thought we couldn't take
another look at an online service for sharing photos and stuff, we
went and took one more look.

It was a good thing, too, because we
discovered the joys of "eSnips.com."
Actually,
it was Joy who discovered the joys. And sharing photos turned out to
be the least you could do with eSnips.

This is a free service that lets you
scissor your way through the World Wide Web, snipping the parts you
like as you go. So far this is very similar to
ClipMarks.com, which we wrote
about in January. However, eSnips goes well beyond. You can save
your clippings back to the web, upload movies, music, presentations
and files, or record audio and video.

If you become a member of eSnips, which
is free, a special Web site is created to hold your uploads. This
can be private or public. If it's public, you can upload almost
anything, and it is available to browsers. Enter a keyword search
and this will take you to sites that contain those hits. Some are
surprisingly large. When we entered "Mark Twain," we got some of his
complete novels. We also found current best sellers posted to eSnips;
it's open range out there.

You can upload one gigabyte of your own files
to eSnips.com and keep it
private. Or, you can keep just some of it private, separating the
material into folders, and making some folders locked and some not.
You can email friends viewing rights to restricted folders. You can
even introduce your folders with a personal video.

There's an eSnips marketplace, where
you can post things for sale to all visitors or just to those you
put on a restricted list. How does eSnips make money? They don't
just yet, but they say they plan to post ads down the road and offer
other services. Meanwhile, it's a very nice site and we have no
reason to think it won't continue that way.

Internuts

·WiredBerries.com: A new
Web site for women who are interested in sports, fitness, food and
related concerns for a healthy life, like relationships, music
and meditation. "WiredBerries Radio" has author interviews. Music
downloads promised for later.

·MyBrainTrainer.com:
Offers free tests of your mental quickness. You can find out how
well you're doing compared to others in your age group who have
taken the same test. We can't help but feel that people who go here
and take the tests probably already know they are above average,
which is going to skew the curve higher. Hey, bring 'em on.

Google is much more than a search
engine, but most people don't know how to access the other features.
This is a big, big book and it will show you theropes.
Get high altitude photos of almost any urban area and have Google
label the roads. Have Google show the names and locations of the
restaurants. Add driving directions. Read and respond to blogs;
create your own blog. And on into the night.

NOTE: Readers can search several years of columns here at
oncomp.com or seven years worth of columns at
oncomp2.com